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For true believers such as myself, the benefits of unencumbered free trade are a given. I don’t need any convincing, and I have no moments of doubt – well, hardly any; free trade spreads innovation, it boosts productivity and it allows nations to specialise in things they are good at, generating a surplus which they can then spend on stuff produced by others they are not so good at

It’s the same principle as doing a specific job. This generates the earnings that support those doing other jobs. Everyone wins. Free trade is Economics 101, and shouldn’t require any defending. Regrettably, its defence is a constant battle, and rarely more so than today.

The good news is that opinion polls in both advanced and emerging market economies show public support for trade remains robust. More than 80pc view trade in a positive light, presumably because of the diversity it offers consumers. The bad news is that fewer than half these people are convinced trade benefits jobs, wages and prices, a scepticism that is particularly strong in advanced economies.

They’ve got a point; when international trade decimates older industries, it leaves many communities high and dry. Aggregate benefit looks all well and good in the thronged restaurants and bars of the metropolis, but very different from the brutality of the coal face.

China’s integration into the West’s rules-based trading system has also created evident distortions; fast-growing Asia has ruthlessly exploited our relatively open markets, while keeping its own tightly sheltered behind unscalable protectionist walls. International trade is widely seen to be unfair, with the West characterised as suckers for the superpower ambitions of an increasingly assertive China. Liberal voices berate Donald Trump for having the temerity to take China on, but he is only responding to legitimate complaint and he is also only doing the sort of things some of them once advocated.

And therein lies the trouble with trade. It is not just about economics; it is also about geopolitics. By the same token, “America first” is not primarily about unfair trade; it is about reasserting the power of the American hegemon and heading off the threat from pretenders.

What, then, to make of President Trump’s now evident determination to open up a new front in his trade war with the rest of the world by whacking additional tariffs on European aircraft cheese, wine, butter, fish and olive oil?

The $11bn (£8.4bn) of threatened tariffs are supposedly a response to a long-running trade dispute regarding state subsidy to Airbus. But it is also symptomatic of a wider breakdown in relations between the two. Prior to Trump, successive US administrations were broadly supportive of the EU and its ambitions, regarding Brussels as an important guarantor of peace in Europe as well as a liberal bulwark against a hostile Russia and other authoritarian powers. President Trump and his advisers have a very different view. To them, the EU is a rival, and potentially threatening, geopolitical power.

That’s what makes the Trump administration so overtly in favour of a no-deal Brexit. Keen to draw the UK away from the EU’s orbit and into its own, it hints that should it go further in its trade war with the EU by slapping swingeing tariffs on car imports, Britain might be given a free pass. We should beware the siren calls.

Under World Trade Organisation rules, that could only happen as part of a wider UK/US free trade agreement in which Britain would struggle to maintain any kind of economic parity. Being forced to take sides is only part of the price we pay for an ever more protectionist world. From bitter experience, we know where that can lead.

Trade and investment – these are two of the three ingredients that make up GDP. It scarcely needs saying that both have been struggling since the financial crisis, particularly in advanced economies, and they are widely thought very much part of the pathology that make up today’s economic stagnation. Unfortunately, President Trump seems to think trade is part of the problem, not the solution.

Analysing experience from 180 countries over the past six decades, new research from the International Monetary Fund finds that trade integration has been a huge driver of investment in plant, machinery and many other high-job-creating areas. Conversely, trade barriers damage investment and employment. This may only seem to confirm received wisdom among economists, but the evidence cannot be stated often enough among politicians inclined to the opposite, populist view.

Specifically, the IMF looked at what might happen if tariffs on all goods traded between the US and China went up by 25 percentage points. That alone would reduce annual GDP by up to 0.6pc in the US and by up to 1.5pc in China.

Growing distrust of established institutions and mainstream political parties – borne out of the perception that existing economic arrangements are not delivering for the population as a whole – makes meaningful structural reform to boost potential output virtually impossible. To the contrary, it has given wings to a whole raft of counterproductive policy initiatives, growing protectionism being only the most visible of them.

The great tragedy here is that we risk undoing so much of the good that has been done these past 30 years by burgeoning international trade.

Worldwide, investment growth has slowed considerably since the global financial crisis of 2008–09. We think of this hiatus as a major part of – for want of a better term – today’s “secular stagnation”, but it is a diagnosis that belies an underlying truth. In fact, according to IMF research, the relative price of machinery and equipment has been plummeting – by about 60pc in advanced and 40pc in emerging market and developing economies since the early 1990s. The relative fall in computer and communications equipment has been even more remarkable.

So we have a kind of optical illusion. Relative to the rest of the economy, according to analysis in the IMF’s latest World Economic Outlook, investment in plant and machinery has been falling but, in real terms, it has risen substantially, even in advanced economies.

The big driver of these price decreases has been international trade, forcing through dramatic gains in productivity and availability. No doubt the international trade system is in urgent need of reform, and no doubt more has to be done in the form of reskilling and education to rescue those left behind by trade’s globalising effects. But we throw grit into the system at our peril. Inevitably, it will make us poorer.